White Papers

Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene or Microwave/RF Electronics Packaging

Abstract:

With the development of microelectronic processing technologies, electronic devices are constantly scaled down with better performance and lower cost, and as predicted by Moor’s law, the density of transistors in integrated circuits would double every 18 months. Leading semiconductor companies like TSMC and Intel are producing transistor with their 10 nm technologies. Further advance in scaling down is very challenging and almost approaching theoretical limit. For example, electrical resistivity of copper interconnects increases with the shrinkage of dimension due to grain-boundary and surface scattering. Electromigration and hot spot of metal interconnects would also become big problems. On the other side, as the transistor is scaling down, more and more cooling is required. Effective thermal management and heat dissipation is becoming a more and more important topic in developing high performance and reliability semiconductor devices. Especially with the most recent development of three-dimensional (3D) integration, vertical dimension is expected to dramatically promote the integration density. However, long term reliability and thermal management issues will come up with higher integration density. These issues are especially important for microwave/RF microelectronics with high power consumption and heat generation. To address these issues, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene have been proposed as potential candidates for RF electronic packaging due to their ultra-high electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity and stability, resistance to electromigration, and mechanical strength. CNTs and graphene have reputations of their excellent mechanical properties, thermal properties, and electrical properties. They are also highly stable and resistive to heat and chemical attacks. In these regards, carbon nanotubes and graphene have been studied extensively from both academia and industry as RF packaging candidate materials. This chapter is going to present a review of carbon nanotubes and graphene advanced materials properties, potential applications, and challenges for RF packaging application.